From pumping gas at a local Texaco to managing a multimillion-dollar operation, Ryan Snow of St. George Transmission and Automotive Repair shares his remarkable path through the industry. In this conversation with Jimmy Lea, Ryan talks about building his shop during the recession, expanding into a two-building “garage mahal,” and developing technicians from the ground up. He dives into the evolution of marketing in an AI-driven world, the real impact of digital inspections, and what it takes to recruit and retain top talent. The discussion wraps with lessons on leadership, growth, and the importance of evolving alongside technology and people.

Host(s):

Jimmy Lea, VP of Business Development

Guest(s):

Ryan Snow, Owner of St George Transmission & Automotive

Show Highlights:

[00:02:28] - Ryan’s early beginnings at a full-service gas station and how it shaped his entry into the automotive industry.

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Episode Transcript Disclaimer

Episode Transcript:

Jimmy Lea: Hello my friend. It is Jimmy Lew here with the Institute for Automotive Business Excellence, and you are listening to the Leading Edge podcast. Joining me today is my very good friend, Mr. Ryan Snow of St. George Transmission and Automotive Repair out of St. George, Utah. I have taken my vehicles there to Ryan.

Jimmy Lea: And Ryan, it is great to see you today. How are you, brother?

Ryan Snow: I'm doing well. Great to, glad to see you again. Thanks for having me.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah, dude, it's so good to see you. Just a refreshening of everything. Your shop was just down the street from my old house and way back in the day I brought my Ford Explorer over there to you.

Jimmy Lea: And most recently it was my son looking at a Honda, looking at a we looked at a Maxima and Oh man, it just never worked out. Yeah.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. I think if I, if memory serves correctly, the first time that we meet or really got a chance to like sit down and talk, was at a at a Mars conference up there logged in.

Ryan Snow: I sat

Jimmy Lea: right next to you.

Ryan Snow: Yeah.

Jimmy Lea: And you're like, dude, I'm from St. George. I'm from St. George. Why didn't we drive together? Yeah. Where's your shop? Oh, I drive by that every day. Yeah. Oh, that's so true, man. Yeah. That was funny. I remember that. That was my first Mars conference, or might've been the second Mars conference in 2021.

Jimmy Lea: Something like that.

Ryan Snow: That sounds about right.

Jimmy Lea: 2019 Maybe. It might've been the second conference in 2021. Yeah. That marketing conference. We're still doing it. Still going strong. Having a fun time. Get back up to the

Ryan Snow: next one. Yeah. And then we would usually only run into each other at different parts of the country at different events.

Ryan Snow: We never saw each other in St. George.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Oh man. And my son is still driving that. The last vehicle you looked at with us, the Toyota Venza.

Ryan Snow: Oh, good.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Yeah. He's still kicking. Oh my gosh. Yeah. It's, and it's kicking really well all wheel drive, which is important in northern Utah. Now we've got snow coming on the road.

Ryan Snow: Hopefully we'll get lots.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully we get lots of snow. That would be awesome. Well, Ryan I'm excited to talk to you today about the automotive industry and some of the challenges that we face as an industry. But before we jump into that, I'd love to know how did you get into the automotive aftermarket?

Ryan Snow: My entry point was basically like a tire buster level. I did tires and brakes for a few summers in high school. You know, I did auto tech in high school, did the skills, USA competition, and then I started working for a little a little service station. You know, I just had a couple of bays.

Ryan Snow: We still would go up and pump gas and check oil, you know, all the way up into the two thousands. That kind of lasted for a while. What? That was part of the shtick?

Jimmy Lea: Well, there was a full service gas station in St. George, Utah.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. East end of the Boulevard was a Texaco, and then it was a shell,

Jimmy Lea: the shell, the one with the propane tank out front.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Oh my gosh. I know exactly what you're talking about.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. It had the only natural gas fill up, you know, port that the public could access. So we had all kinds of weird natural gas cars coming through. Yep. So I was there for a few years and started to actually ranch more, get a little bit deeper into cars.

Ryan Snow: But I kind of was working as a hybrid service advisor. I just didn't know it yet. So I left that to go sell parts. And so I spent a couple years selling parts and became a wholesale parts manager for the area. And one day I was delivering parts to this shop and just kind of venting about the parts sales part of the industry and, you know, crying and moaning about work.

Ryan Snow: And the owner of the shop at the time was like, well, hey, if you want something different, I got a spot for you. And so I stopped selling parts and I figured if I was gonna sell parts, I would also sell labor as well. So. I came into the shop environment and I was selling nearly the same volume of parts.

Ryan Snow: Oh my gosh. But with, you know, all the technician labor on top of that. And I came to this shop because after selling parts, you start to get to know like what shops are ran well, what technicians are actually good technicians. And this shop was one of the only shops that I would've like ever thought about taking my personal vehicle to.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Wow. So it's like,

Ryan Snow: I like, oh, okay. Okay. The transmission guys are sharp. I wanna, if I'm gonna work in a shop, I wanna work with the smart guys, so.

Jimmy Lea: Oh, that's cool. So at what point did you step into ownership with the shop?

Ryan Snow: I started with the shop in 2008 and I think I took over the manager spot.

Ryan Snow: Probably sometime around 2013 or 14. And after that went away from the shop a little bit. I spent a few years doing photography and video work full-time and then got asked to come back and kind of take a shot back over. So at that point I came back in as a partner.

Jimmy Lea: Nice.

Ryan Snow: And been rolling since then.

Ryan Snow: So I guess I've been in an ownership capacity since roughly 2017. 2018.

Jimmy Lea: Oh, congrats bro. That's so awesome. And I know you've got the two, two buildings now. 'cause when I first started coming over, it was just the one with the what is it, 12 bays inside, and you've got nine master certified techs that are working transmissions.

Jimmy Lea: Is that still the scenario?

Ryan Snow: Yeah. Yeah. More or less. So the the lore was the previous owner originally built the shop that I'm sitting in right now, which is the new shop. Which is the old shop.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. So he

Ryan Snow: or he originally had built this and and 2008 right when I came on he built the new building.

Ryan Snow: It's about double the square footage. Yeah. To take all the transmission stuff over there. And 2008 was a hell of a time to enter the industry and have a brand new building and a whole new debt load to service.

Jimmy Lea: Oh yeah. Oh 8, 0 9 and oh 10. Oh my gosh. That was tough.

Ryan Snow: And so my first few years, the shop had previously done almost no general auto repair to now we do everything.

Ryan Snow: We got, you know, we got guys that we need to keep busy and so. We were actually able to grow through the whole recession. Like we went through a rough patch and then we progressed another level or two, you know, kind of by the time we got through the end of the recession.

Ryan Snow: And a lot of that came from being able to finally service repeat customers.

Jimmy Lea: Oh my gosh, dude, that's awesome

Ryan Snow: because transmission shops almost never have anybody as a repeat customer unless the job didn't go well or it's another vehicle, or it's their friend or their family. But this expansion came about last year when the tenant that had been in it for a long time was moving out.

Ryan Snow: And so we took the opportunity to basically add some more base space and give us a secondary marketing arm and hopefully fill that, that demand of, you know, more minor repair or maintenance and service work. Aside from, you know, the deep, heavy line surgery that, that we are primarily doing in the big shop now.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Right. Oh my gosh, that's awesome. So the in between, wasn't that the granite slab company that was there for a minute?

Ryan Snow: Yeah. It was a granite warehouse and sho room for a long time. Before that, it was two or three different collision shops. It was a couple of different diesel shops.

Ryan Snow: There was somebody that was making cabinets for like six months.

Jimmy Lea: Oh my gosh. That's amazing. So I get a,

Ryan Snow: I get a lot of people's random junk mail steel.

Jimmy Lea: Oh, really?

Ryan Snow: Yeah.

Jimmy Lea: Oh, that's crazy. That is crazy.

Ryan Snow: There's companies, I get mail for the, with this address that I don't even remember being here and I was.

Ryan Snow: The whole time.

Jimmy Lea: Oh my gosh, that's crazy. So maybe they were running multiple companies out of the one location. Yeah.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. I think this was the LLC address for some multiple enterprises.

Jimmy Lea: Right. So when you came in and you were so, and high school, you were at the gas, the Shell station did a little bit of wrenching, but it sounds like it was more oil and brakes.

Jimmy Lea: Not so much. Yeah. So heavy,

Ryan Snow: A lot of people that move into an ownership position I'm a little jealous of because most of 'em are former technicians that became owners. Yeah. I am not I would call myself barely a c tech. Yeah. But

Jimmy Lea: you are GS qualified.

Ryan Snow: Yeah, I'm, I am GS qualified and I can talk a lot about everything on a vehicle.

Jimmy Lea: Oh, knowledge is

Ryan Snow: dangerous. But I always went to, you know, I always went to every bit of training that came in. If technicians were going training, I was going training. I've always been really curious about how does it work, why does it work? And so over the years I spent a lot more time, you know, being more involved with like the diagnostic side, not necessarily taking over diagnostics, but if a technician gets stuck on something, then you gotta put heads together to get unstuck, find a new test, stay fresh on what kind of new tools are coming out.

Ryan Snow: So,

Jimmy Lea: yeah. Yeah, sometimes that different perspective is all you need to be able to crack the code.

Ryan Snow: Yeah, like I've always been kind of the early adopter tech nerd, so, you know, as soon as I learned what you could do with the lab scope, I was like, oh, weird. We're buying multiple lab scopes, everybody in the software.

Ryan Snow: And you get a lab scope

Jimmy Lea: and you

Ryan Snow: get a lab scope. Yeah. Every, everybody's gonna go to a lab scope class and we're gonna all learn about waveform analyzation. 'cause that's super interesting to go over on a lunch break.

Jimmy Lea: Oh yeah. I mean, that's when you start nerding out, for sure. Yeah. Oh, that's cool.

Jimmy Lea: So from there, you are where you are now, you've got the one building with the nine techs and it and the new old, the old new building. It's the new building, St. George Transmission auto Repair. Isn't there four, four lifts in there, or is there six?

Ryan Snow: There's six and some flat bays. So in total we've got, you know, 18 bays right next door to each other.

Ryan Snow: We can hold approximately a hundred vehicles plus employee vehicles on, on the property and in, in the bays. Whoa. So if we, you know, if our work in progress gets above a hundred vehicles, then we are busting people in basically.

Jimmy Lea: Oh yeah. Yeah. You would be that would be crazy. So what's the car look like for you guys right now?

Jimmy Lea: I mean, that's, you're like a garage mahal, man. That's ginormous.

Ryan Snow: So what's that car

Jimmy Lea: count? Yeah. What are you looking at on a monthly or weekly? Daily, monthly, weekly.

Ryan Snow: We're usually, depending on how many oil changes we're doing, which is not a lot we might be running only three to three 50 for a monthly car count.

Ryan Snow: But we tend to run a much higher average ro.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah.

Jimmy Lea: What's your average ro. These days

Ryan Snow: it can be between 12 and $1,500 depending on the spread of transmission work versus general repair work.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah, no, that's solid. That's

Ryan Snow: solid. How heavy are we marketing things like

Jimmy Lea: that? Yeah. Well, on every vehicle that's on the road today, there's anywhere from 2000 to $3,000 worth of safety repairs that need to be done.

Jimmy Lea: They just haven't done 'em yet. They bring 'em to your shop, you do a digital vehicle inspection, you identify the things that need to repair, and it's up to them to make sure that they get it repaired, whether they do it with you or somebody else. So, yeah. And we,

Ryan Snow: we primarily still have a reputation as a breakdown shop.

Ryan Snow: You know, most things are coming in inoperable on a tow truck.

Jimmy Lea: Wow. And so

Ryan Snow: By the time we get to the bottom of that concern, and we also look at the rest of the vehicle so that we can give the customer an educated estimate on. You're gonna fix the major problem. You're also gonna need these other issues if you want your car to be reliable, safe, and operable, even in the near term.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. Now you need to make a holistic decision, not just, yeah, we need to buy the transmission. Like, are you gonna, are you ready to do everything? 'cause if not, maybe I don't want to take your money for this one problem.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Oh no, it's so true. And maybe you're deciding, well, is it time to get that new used vehicle or that new vehicle, or, Hey, you know what,

Jimmy Lea: yeah.

Jimmy Lea: New

Jimmy Lea: vehicles are so expensive. 60, 70, $80,000 for 20,000. We get you back on the road. You're safe and you're good to go for another a hundred, 200,000 miles.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. O obviously I'm incentivized to wanna repair everything. Sure. And I would love to repair everything but. I also got into this business and stay in this business because I wanna serve my community, which means I need to help everybody make the best decision that we can make.

Ryan Snow: A

Jimmy Lea: hundred percent. And if you lay that out for them so that they can see it and understand it. You're doing digital vehicle inspections? I'm assuming?

Jimmy Lea: Yeah.

Jimmy Lea: So every single customer gets a digital vehicle inspection so they can see what needs repair.

Ryan Snow: Yep. Yeah. Some car comes in for an oil change, gets the same inspection, car comes in for a transmission overhaul, gets the same inspection.

Ryan Snow: Wow.

Jimmy Lea: That's pretty good. So it must be a pretty good in-depth inspection for everybody that they're getting.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. Yeah. I know we would all like to, we would all like it to be a little bit quicker, but as a group we kind of decided that we want these things noted. We want these things tracked,

Jimmy Lea: you know, and there's some CCYA.

Jimmy Lea: Doing a thorough digital inspection. And speaking from experience, 'cause I've gotten your digital vehicle inspections. You guys do a really thorough good job and I appreciate that as a consumer.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. There, there is a time investment into it and there is a monetary investment to it.

Ryan Snow: You know, I pay my technicians to do a DVI, I know a lot of places don't how much you pay. I know. 0.25.

Jimmy Lea: Point two five. Nice. That's solid.

Ryan Snow: And we aim at, you know, getting it done in a true 15 minutes. But you know, that at least covers the time. It's not a big thing. But I'll sit in a round table and argue with people until we're all red in the face on whether that's a good thing to do or a bad thing to do.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. The only thing I'd say is you, we should pay three tenths and give the tech more time to do it. 'cause the more time, the more thorough, you know, I, but there's the, there's a long argument there too.

Ryan Snow: I think that there ought to be a flat rate inspection fee for every vehicle that comes in to ensure safety.

Ryan Snow: But you know, most states are going away from safety inspections. And so it's on us as an industry to at least point it out and say, Hey, this is already unsafe or rapidly gonna be unsafe.

Jimmy Lea: Oh, for sure. When was it that Utah stopped doing their state inspections? How long ago was that?

Ryan Snow: I wanna say it's been four or five years now.

Jimmy Lea: So it's probably 2019 ish.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. Somewhere 20 19, 20 21. Somewhere in there.

Jimmy Lea: My word seems like it was just yesterday. Time flies. Yeah. Unreal. Well, congrats on where you're at and where you've come up through the ranks. It sounds like you took a little hiatus for some videography, photography.

Jimmy Lea: But yeah,

Ryan Snow: The automotive industry is one of those sticky industries where you can try to walk away, but you might not make it very far.

Jimmy Lea: Nope. You usually don't because that 10 30 oil weight is just running through your veins and, you know, you gotta get back to it. So that's awesome.

Jimmy Lea: What does the future look like for you, Ryan? Where are you gonna go? What is the three year, the five year, the 10 year plan for Ryan Snow, the family, your partners? What does that look like?

Ryan Snow: For us as a company a big motivation has kind of been, you know, we've always grown our own technicians.

Ryan Snow: We've brought a lot of guys up from fresh to being super legit Pepsi challenge full stack technicians, and it takes a long time and there's a lot of. There's a lot of pain and suffering that goes into that development. And so we've always been trying to figure out how do we do that better?

Ryan Snow: How do we insulate the company from the liability of a new technician?

Jimmy Lea: Okay.

Ryan Snow: Especially if we're doing any heavy line work, complex work, late model European cars, like the liability can get expensive very quickly. And so if we're only limited to saying, you know, like, you can only come work in my shop if you're an a technician and have a bunch of years of experience, I would love to have an entire company full of those people.

Ryan Snow: And I get that mentality, but somebody in the industry has to be able to create the environment to cycle, you know, technicians through that initial learning curve. That means giving people room to make mistakes and mistakes cost money. And they cost time and they cost goodwill with customers.

Ryan Snow: So we're always trying to figure out how to balance that and increase our ability to, you know, find people that really wanna work, really want to get into the industry and be able to actually do it. 'cause I'm not gonna say we've ever been good at doing that.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah.

Ryan Snow: So that was another big motivation for, you know, expanding the shop is to get more, you know, c tech work and d tech work floating around so that we can have more of that stuff to do.

Jimmy Lea: I love it. Are you participating in the community at all or the high schools? Dixie Dixie High School comes to my mind. I know they've got an auto program as does desert Hills High School. Do you get involved with them at all with their program?

Ryan Snow: I I'm more directly involved with the technical college.

Ryan Snow: You know, Dixie Technical College has a sub one year automotive program.

Jimmy Lea: Okay.

Ryan Snow: And so I think they're running multiple cohorts at a time now. So they graduate two to three tranches of students a year. Whoa. So I sit on that it's called the Occupational Advisory Council Board. And you know, there's a meeting, I think once a quarter for that, and that gets pretty involved.

Ryan Snow: I've always found it really interesting that I'm usually the only independent shop that's there every, it's all dealerships. Every dealership has got people there and every dealership is stinking money and cars and scan tools and free training into, you know, into the trade school.

Ryan Snow: And I'm the only independent guy there. So. I also sit on the board for the Automatic Transmission Rebuilds Association. And so I, I was able to help facilitate a relationship with the A TRA organization and the college by being a sponsor. So all the students have access to all of the virtual training system training modules that are inside of the ATRA membership platform.

Jimmy Lea: Dude, that's awesome.

Ryan Snow: And so, so now the, when they go through transmission training on that, it's like two or three weeks and maybe one week, then the shop in two weeks or classroom time. And so if anybody's brain is tickled when their hands are actually inside of it, like I need them to be able to like go explore that more.

Ryan Snow: Go learn more about that. 'cause if you like that there's, we got there's still people that do that at a, you know, for a living. So maybe, oh yeah, maybe we need to talk.

Jimmy Lea: Well, congrats man. That, that is awesome. Is Dixie Technical College? Is that's not the same as Utah Tech.

Jimmy Lea: Those are two. Yeah.

Ryan Snow: Ut u Yeah. Utah Tech is the main university Dixon Technical College is up on the old airport hill. And they're just a, they're just a grade school, so they do automotive, diesel, welding, auto body, culinary drafting bunch of stuff. It's a really cool set up there.

Jimmy Lea: Oh, that's awesome. I have not been to that one. I know of it. I know where it is, but I've never been into it. The Dixie. Yeah. Next

Ryan Snow: time you're in town. We'll they'll stick your head in there.

Jimmy Lea: Oh yeah. Well, dang it. The problem is I'm there on a weekend now. It's gonna be the weekend. So we're coming, the beginning of November, we're gonna celebrate the grandbaby's birthdays.

Jimmy Lea: Oh, cool. Passing through town. Yeah. Yeah. That's

Ryan Snow: all fun.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. Aside from that the future of the company is a lot of new technology coming out. There's a lot new, a lot of new transmissions. You know, they keep adding more gears to more automatic transmissions, and every time that happens, we get to completely relearn a whole bunch of new mechanisms, a whole assembly and disassembly process, all new program strategy or control strategies.

Ryan Snow: So,

Jimmy Lea: yeah.

Ryan Snow: What do you think of

Jimmy Lea: these CVTs?

Ryan Snow: I think they're getting better, but, oh, that's

Jimmy Lea: good. That's good to hear.

Ryan Snow: I think that the, like the Nissan, the, you know, the Nissan CVT debacle has probably done more damage to the brand than any other one thing that they could have done.

Jimmy Lea: Oh no. So

Ryan Snow: many people that had a Nissan CVT failure will probably never buy a Nissan product again.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. So for my mother who's listening, and she wants to know what is a CVT, it's a continuously variable transmission.

Jimmy Lea: Is that right? Is that the acronym? Yeah.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah.

Jimmy Lea: And so, Nissan is famous for having them. Honda had them for a minute. Are they still doing cbts in the Hondas?

Ryan Snow: It seems like they've got some new ones. There's always a big push for everybody to go back to cbts because they're really advantageous for fuel economy.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah.

Ryan Snow: And a lot of 'em, if you keep the fluid fresh and keep the fluid from getting hot, then they're not nearly as bad. But they are severely under maintained by the time they get to us.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Usually. And that's a thousand piece jigsaw puzzle with no pitcher.

Ryan Snow: Yeah.

Jimmy Lea: And that sucker starts falling apart.

Jimmy Lea: Forget about it. That's tough.

Ryan Snow: But yeah, the the transmission games always evolving, always getting more interesting. So we're gonna, you know, that's kind of our DNA, so we're always gonna stay on the front line of what's going on there.

Jimmy Lea: Nice. It's, so your plan is you're bringing up some apprentice.

Jimmy Lea: You've got some Gs, you've got some Ctec, some bts and quite a few ATECs are your ATECs of that teaching mindset where they're able to work with these guys and help bring them along?

Ryan Snow: Some guys are if everybody's trying to stay productive that it's hard to have a bunch of new personalities that need assistance going on at once.

Ryan Snow: Right. And so, well, we, we try to really just promote a communal knowledge mindset. So we get together, like if somebody learns something really weird about a vehicle or about a particular job, a lot of times. You know, the next time we're in a huddle or something like that, we're gonna talk about it and make sure everybody, you know, knows about that.

Jimmy Lea: Like the, like a lunch and learn. Everybody gets together for a lunch and

Ryan Snow: learn. Yeah. You know, like, like the first time somebody figured out like, oh, if you wiggle your arm, just this way you can get to the oil pressure sender on the backside of an LS motor without taking the intake off.

Jimmy Lea: Oh my gosh.

Ryan Snow: Everybody gather around. I'm gonna show you the angle that you gotta get to, and then you can get to it, and that's gonna just save everybody a whole lot of heartache. And I was like, excellent. Okay. Great.

Jimmy Lea: Wow. Yeah. That is, and that's cool. That's cool that you have that because that reinforces the learning when the person that learns the most is the teacher.

Jimmy Lea: So once a student has learned it and now they go to teach it, they learn even more by teaching it to everybody else.

Ryan Snow: Yeah.

Jimmy Lea: And it sticks longer.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. We've talked a lot about,

Ryan Snow: you start coming up through business and you start delegating more things. You start adding more staff. You start adding, you know, additional layers of leadership inside of a company.

Ryan Snow: Yep. And then you gotta watch somebody that you trained. Go train somebody else. And I'll be damned if they do not always train at a rate that is about double what they were doing really? And so I'm always, you know, it's always like, Hey, like you just, you know, you just trained Sally this process perfectly, but you do it this way.

Ryan Snow: That means you knew the whole time

Jimmy Lea: you called how to

Ryan Snow: actually do it. So you didn't give that discretionary effort. Now you're a manager and you're trying to get that discretionary effort outta somebody and it just, and keeps getting kicked down the road. See how that works?

Jimmy Lea: Oh wow.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. You gotta hold 'em accountable. This is the process of procedure. You're not doing it this way. Gotta hold 'em accountable. Wow. It does happen. It does happen. So the option, the the plan is that you're growing your own, you got the apprentices coming up. You're really looking at optimizing a single location to be a mega, mega multimillion dollar per year performance.

Jimmy Lea: Out of we'll call it two buildings. But isn't it really just, is it really just one business or are you still running them separate?

Ryan Snow: It's two brands, but it is one business. Okay. It's basically two different departments,

Jimmy Lea: correct? Correct. So you man, you must be up. Can I guess, are you up in the 3.6, 4.2 million per year range?

Ryan Snow: Yeah. We should be in, in that kind of a range for this year and that that should be a stepping stone for us. Like we've got a, we've got a big period of refinement to go through.

Jimmy Lea: Okay.

Ryan Snow: But you know, the total building capacity is almost just sickening. The delta between where we're at and what the total building capacity is.

Ryan Snow: So

Jimmy Lea: that's what I was gonna ask. What is the full potential? I'm figuring it's gotta be six to 8 million.

Ryan Snow: It's like full potential. Like if you had a tech in every bay and everything was running slick and you had half a dozen really solid leaders running around, keeping all the cats herded.

Jimmy Lea: Yes. Yes. Cat herd included.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah.

Ryan Snow: Then yeah, the campus is probably six to $8 million a year at full Monty. I don't know if it's, I don't know if I am a good enough leader to get it to that point.

Jimmy Lea: Well, and that's where you have to surround yourself with the team and the team. Yeah. They lock arms together. You can't do it yourself.

Jimmy Lea: There's no way. Yeah. There's no way no individual could lift that. But as a team working together, you go from me to we, that becomes the we attitude together. We can do this, let's do this. And that gets the buy-in from everybody. They're all firing on all eight cylinders. They're all putting in a hundred percent.

Jimmy Lea: You, you're efficiency, proficiency, output productivity is a hundred percent, 105%, 110%, 120%. When you get up into that range of production, dude, sky's the limit. No, the sky's not.

Ryan Snow: Yeah, that's, it gets massive. I know some guys around the country that, you know, I've always been reaching out, trying to talk to people that are just running really big single locations because it's just a different animal.

Ryan Snow: It's a different animal than running three or four, you know, three or four or five bay locations.

Jimmy Lea: Oh, yeah. Oh, totally.

Ryan Snow: And do you know who's

Jimmy Lea: should talk to? Do you know Tracy Holt? Precision Performance Place? Yeah. Tracy Performance Place. I'll give you his number afterwards. Lemme write that down.

Jimmy Lea: Down 20 bays, 20 lifts up in South Jordan, west Jordan. Something like that.

Ryan Snow: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I've I think I tripped over him online one time and that was on my list of somebody I needed to talk to. But you know, we've gone from you know, for years and years, we always had, you know, between nine and 11 employees and now we're probably gonna be, you know, knocking on 20 by the end of the year.

Ryan Snow: And it's been hard to get the headcount up to where we need to be for the space that we have and for the amount of cars that are here, you know, which is just one of the challenges, the industry. But the. The management requirement, the leadership requirement, the HR expense, the benefit expense of having a crew that big is just a different problem that I'm only going through for the first time.

Ryan Snow: So I, I lean on a lot of people that I know that are, you know, that run 16, 18 bay shops. And I know a guy that he, I know a guy that's got two different 12 or 14 bay shops. I don't exactly know but I do know that he is able to legitimately run about a 36% net every single month because he can outrun that overhead with half of his, you know, half of his production space.

Ryan Snow: He cannot out run overhead. And so everything that happens on top of that is just gravy.

Jimmy Lea: Oh, that's awesome. Denny, so Denny's might be a good one to talk to as well. I don't know how many bays he has. Mitch. Mitch and Darren Montour. Do you know them?

Ryan Snow: Where are they out of?

Jimmy Lea: Ooh. The South Jordan area as well.

Jimmy Lea: I think

Ryan Snow: Northern. I don't think so. I know a lot more people from around the country than I do like in northern Utah. It's kind of funny. Yeah, I gotta get up and I gotta get up and shake more hands up there.

Jimmy Lea: Come on up, man. I got a place for you.

Ryan Snow: Let's do it. Come

Jimmy Lea: on up. You're welcome. Yeah. Get running a garage, Mahal, as you are, is a different beast than running multiple locations, multiple operations of a three bays or four bays, or even six bays.

Jimmy Lea: If you got multiples to equal what you have at a single location, it's a different beast. So you're tackling quite the beast there, and congratulations to you. That's super awesome that you're able to do. Oh, thank

Ryan Snow: you. I don't recommend anybody. Go for it.

Ryan Snow: That's not true. There, there's obviously scenarios and every business is different, but I think that if I had to, if I had to do it all over again, I'd, I would probably try to maximize a six base shop and then go maximize a six base shop and then go maximize a six bay shop.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Oh yeah.

Jimmy Lea: No that's sound advice. Tom Lambert might be another one for you to talk to. Shade Trudo.

Ryan Snow: Yeah, I have talked to him a couple times. Oh

Jimmy Lea: yeah, he's a rad dude. He just bought, well, just his relative, I think a few years ago he bought a second location or third location actually. AB Hadley up there in Ogden.

Ryan Snow: Oh, good for them.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Yeah. It's the old Studebaker building.

Ryan Snow: Oh, cool. It is. That's a cool legacy to have.

Jimmy Lea: It is a cool, and when you get up there to see the building, dude, because next time you come to Mars, it is just down the street from the institute's headquarters.

Ryan Snow: When is the next Mars?

Jimmy Lea: We just had the last one, so it's gonna be another year before we have it Next year. I'll get it for you. I'll email you and let you know when that date is.

Ryan Snow: Is it usually like September-ish though?

Jimmy Lea: It's usually, yeah. August, September, October. Somewhere in that range. So I'll let you know. I'll have to get you up.

Jimmy Lea: Awesome. So, something that, because you've been in the photography industry something I would love to talk to you about is marketing for the modern shops. What do you think are some of those challenges that shops are really facing when it comes to marketing?

Ryan Snow: Ooh. This is one of those things that, oh the painter's house is always painted last.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Yeah. The copper's children never have good shoes and the landscapers. Yeah. I, yeah I don't,

Ryan Snow: I don't take, I don't take care of my stuff as, as well as I should or as well as I'm capable of. I think that a lot of things are changing. I've been doing a lot of interesting reading about the AI influence on Google search, just in relation to auto repair.

Ryan Snow: Okay.

Jimmy Lea: What do you mean? And seeing,

Ryan Snow: What I'm seeing. And I was lucky enough to have a couple of conversations with some people that, that are contractors for Google. And they, you know, they used to work for ad you know, the AdWords department or whatever AdWords section of Google.

Ryan Snow: They're doing this other thing but what they've been, you know, talking to me and what I've been, you know, what I've been reading on is a lot of the, a lot of the keyword based searching that converted most for an auto repair shop was things like auto repair near me, oil change repair near me water pump repair or AC repair, and, you know, coupled with a geographic location and then authority based ranking based on your reviews the amount of hitch your website gets, if people click around on your website.

Ryan Snow: All those things kind of coming together. And there, there is a beginning of a potential trend of people asking way more direct questions about their car. Ai, AI to Google search but Google search, but even if you don't, even if you don't search, you know, through the AI portal in Google, they are using, you know, they are using their whole AI platform to, to start to rearrange how results are served.

Ryan Snow: And so people are asking really specific questions like, I drive a 2013 Nissan Sentra with a CVT, that shutters, where should I go? Wow.

Jimmy Lea: Okay.

Ryan Snow: And now, you know, the, all of the content that's on your website, everybody who's been talking about you on Facebook or Reddit or Twitter. All of that stuff is getting looked at in a way that it wasn't before your blog pages.

Ryan Snow: Like for a long time, blogs have been such trash because they're just generic. SEO

Jimmy Lea: Yeah.

Ryan Snow: There's nothing interesting in 'em. It doesn't sound like a human wrote 'em, it, it sounds like an SEO bot wrote them.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah.

Ryan Snow: And that is starting to d your authority level at some level in the modern search results, I feel, because you're not really providing good information or good con content, and you're not communicating in your blog the way that you would communicate to a customer that was sitting across from you at the counter.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. So you gotta write it like you're talking to a customer, not like you're talking. Yeah. You gotta write it like you're

Ryan Snow: interacting with a human, because now the computer is really good at knowing what a human wants to hear.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Well, and that's that large language.

Ryan Snow: Predictive text.

Ryan Snow: Like it's just guessing what's gonna come next based off of what it already has covered.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. So all those blogs are valuable if it's written in your language, if it's not a copy and paste from some

Ryan Snow: Yeah, I, you know what? I don't know. Yeah. I don't know what the, I can't, I, I don't know what the right answer is, but everything that we're doing with our online presence has to be demonstrating expertise, authority, and integrity.

Jimmy Lea: Yes. Or

Ryan Snow: else it is not gonna weigh as well against what you're currently doing. So if you're spending a bunch of money on Google AdWords, you gotta start looking at that really close. 'cause if you're reading a lot about what's going on right now, you're gonna end up being more familiar with it than whoever your vendor is.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Quite potentially. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. The local ads. They cost you twice as much, but it's much more qualified than a normal Google ad.

Jimmy Lea: And have you gotten your shops Google certified?

Ryan Snow: I started to get the local service certification, and I got hung up on my LLC and my DBA and my second DBA and my insurance certificate of off, or my certificate of insurance.

Ryan Snow: Not all jiving and Right. So I'm in the middle of trying to get it all undone. Okay. And then I've talked to a handful of people in the country that the local service ads are just killing it for 'em, and some of 'em are just kind of not working that well. So it's interesting to see and I don't know how much they're changing, but I also was told recently that they're changing up some of the.

Ryan Snow: Requirements for the local services ads and Yes. And maybe how they actually serve it up to the the users.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Well, after Google got sued a few times for Google's old certification process, they had to change it up. That's why it's such a heavy lift for you these days. You've gotta get it all dialed in.

Jimmy Lea: Right. And once you do, it'll be really good for you.

Ryan Snow: Got my distracting shop dog now.

Jimmy Lea: Oh, you, that's a gorgeous,

Ryan Snow: he is a good dog.

Jimmy Lea: Nice. What's the name? Rocco. What's up, Rocco? Oh, he's gone. Yeah. So the the process here is much more of a heavy lift for you because to be Google certified now you do have to certify.

Jimmy Lea: It's more than just a picture and a location and a web address.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. Yeah. There, there's a. A higher level of establishing bonafides before you can get that badge.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah, that's right. Which I don't necessarily think is a bad thing. No, it is a, it's a good thing. It keeps the riffraff away. That hopefully is what brought it down originally.

Jimmy Lea: And it allows you to operate more professionally. And just like in any market, what works Well, some markets, yeah. Rural Yelp is not a thing. Some markets heavy heavily populated East Coast, west Coast, Yelp is very strong in those markets. Each market is different. What pops, what hits some markets, it's Facebook.

Jimmy Lea: Some markets, it's all about Yelp. Some markets it's about Google search.

Ryan Snow: I used to swear that mailers were just an absolute waste of time.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Are you doing postcards now?

Ryan Snow: Yeah. And then I figured, and then I figured out how they work, and then I figured out how to actually track data and how to be patient and how to do some aid and testing.

Jimmy Lea: Nice. Excellent.

Ryan Snow: And you know, oh look you can't just do it once and get an amazing result and then be done. Like, this is constant evolvement. It's constant monitoring. It's constant tracking.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. How do you track it? How do you track your postcards?

Ryan Snow: We mark 'em in the shop management system as a source, and then we clip all the coupons throughout the ro number on 'em and put 'em in the till.

Jimmy Lea: Yep.

Ryan Snow: So some poor individual, A lot of times me sits down and plugs, you know, just starts a, we have a big spreadsheet, so start with the RO number and then we can divide and conquer and go, you know, pull the RO number and let's grab what did we recommend? What did we close? Has the customer been here before?

Ryan Snow: Now I'm starting to be, now I'm starting to, you know, be able to tie my database back and say like, okay, they came in for a mailer, oil change. And then they came in again. And then they came in again and now their A RO is back up to being a normal A RO because they got to try us a few times and now they like us.

Ryan Snow: Now they trust us. Now we can roll.

Jimmy Lea: There you go. I think you just hit on it right there. When they trust you, then you're able to. Make those additional recommendations. And then, which is a,

Ryan Snow: which is a trip for me. Yeah. Because I come from a transmission and a heavy line breakdown world. So my first time visit a RO is traditionally three times higher Yeah.

Ryan Snow: Than my repeat customer, a RO. And then, you know, I jump into the other side of the world where most of my friends operate, and now it's the complete opposite.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. And this is where you're learning that patient first

Ryan Snow: time. Yeah. You know, launch a new location or a new brand or something like that.

Ryan Snow: And you know, even if every, even if everybody tells you to get ready for your first time, visit a RO to be sub hundred dollars for a bunch of visits. Like, it can happen. It can happen.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Especially if it's, especially if it's brand new. So those first time visit coupon clippers, postcards.

Jimmy Lea: First time visit for an oil service that are coming in for just the oil service. Are they getting the same DVI as everybody else? Yep. Nice. So you're pointing out to them, Hey, these are the things that, this is red, yellow, green. I'm assuming this some similar process to the red, yellow, green, red says, these are safety things, whether you do 'em here with us or not, it's up to you.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. You can't can watch it. You can't

Ryan Snow: scare, yeah. You can't scare everybody away. If somebody comes in with, you know, if somebody comes in with a $75 oil change coupon on an Audi and you hit 'em with a $3,500 quote, even if it's super legit and every, you know, every bit of that thing is needed, they're most likely not gonna buy it from you or they're gonna buy it from you and you're never gonna see 'em again.

Jimmy Lea: And we're looking for longevity. We want the relationship.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. Yeah. Obviously it's not every time, it's just if we zoom way back out and look at math.

Jimmy Lea: Yes. A hundred percent.

Ryan Snow: You know, you gotta be able to say, Hey, we looked at everything. Here are the facts. Would you like to come out and look, we have photos, we have videos.

Ryan Snow: I can walk you out and I can show you. You can touch it.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. This is what your car's telling us. It's not us. This is what the car is saying. So if you're upset at anybody, look at the car. Yeah. Be upset at the car, not at me.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. We're, we are here to slay that dragon with you, you know, and then the next time it comes in, okay, look, this problem is getting worse, or this leak is getting bigger.

Ryan Snow: We can put off doing this, but you're need to start thinking about doing this. And then, you know, it might take a trip or two, you might kill it the first time and just lock a customer in for life. Or it might go completely sideways and you have to come back from total calamity and then that's your best customer for a decade.

Ryan Snow: Oh yeah. A, a lot of the game has given people the room to try you out and see if you like each other. Sure. We can continue to do this together.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Kind of that dating system, that dating game where you're finding Yeah. If you guys are gonna get along or not. Yeah. So true. So postcards, that's something new that you're trying out.

Jimmy Lea: Google certification, that's a process definitely worth it. I

Ryan Snow: would, yeah. Google Certification's process. A buddy of mine earlier this year, we made a bet that we wouldn't have the balls to just cancel our Google ads. Ooh. So I did. Oh yeah. Wow. Okay. And we, we leaned into some geographic based you know, retargeting and banner ads and stronger search engine marketing and you know, optimizing some stuff on the website and.

Ryan Snow: I'll be jammed if I don't have like 40% more Google business profile interactions this year over last year, and probably close to double website clicks.

Jimmy Lea: Interesting. So a lot of that organic and Yeah, this is new. Like I,

Ryan Snow: I, I learned that earlier this week when we finally started to sit down and go through stuff.

Ryan Snow: So,

Jimmy Lea: congratulations. That's all. I didn't

Ryan Snow: expect it. You know, we're tracking call count, you know, the inbound phone calls all the way through that and everything, so,

Jimmy Lea: yeah. Oh, that's good. Hey, and with your inbound phone calls, do you have the technology to be able to track was an opportunity missed, lost made?

Ryan Snow: Yeah.

Jimmy Lea: Okay.

Ryan Snow: Yeah, we can see all phone calls that are inbound. If it's the first time the number has called or not. We get really nice transcription so we get like an AI transcription and then we can see. Did somebody call to schedule? Did somebody call, was it just a price shopper?

Jimmy Lea: Love it.

Jimmy Lea: Love it.

Ryan Snow: If I can just get a tag of all the price shoppers so I can go through and look at those calls and see, yeah how did we handle the price shoppers?

Jimmy Lea: Oh, I love it. I love it. So, couple questions for you. One is about your phone system first. But first is about your point of sale system that you're marking it as a postcard.

Jimmy Lea: What point of sale system are you using?

Ryan Snow: We're using shop wear.

Jimmy Lea: Shop wear, phenomenal software. Phenomenal. Okay, good. And then second is your phone system. How is it that you're able to see if it's a first time caller, the ai, the transcript, that sounds like quite the system you've got. What are you using for your phone system?

Ryan Snow: It's pretty impressive. It's called Digital Concierge. They, I don't know what they were doing before, but there's a company called Octo Rocket that is like a data analytics platform that integrates with Tech metric and. Shop ware, maybe a handful of others. And they acquired, or were acquired by a voiceover IP company called Digital Concierge.

Jimmy Lea: Okay.

Ryan Snow: That they've got a, they've got a lot of really solid CRM tools and they have a really robust voiceover IP setup. And with that all tied in and integrated with the point of sale system, now I can do things like if I see a decline, you know, if I see a ticket that was just declined, I can go say, all right, what were all of the communications.

Ryan Snow: Involved with that Ro, you know, where did that source, like where did that source come from? Who talks to 'em? How did we present it? Where did we drop the ball? And then it's a lot easier to be able to train somebody through that scenario because you can say, look like the rest of your team teed you up.

Ryan Snow: And then it went here and dropped. Dropped.

Jimmy Lea: Oh, wow. That's powerful. And especially because you can do it in real time. This was yesterday. This was earlier this week. It's not like, oh, this is a call from a month ago. It took us a month to find it, to research it, to tie all this phone calls together.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. Or I had to wait for a customer to be mad enough for long enough that they decided to reach out to me to let me know that there was a problem.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. And

Ryan Snow: now I gotta go try to, you know, chase it back

Jimmy Lea: and you can chase it much faster now.

Ryan Snow: Yeah, you can get, you can run to the problem a lot quicker when it's,

Jimmy Lea: oh, yeah. Oh, and you know what? You're teeing up a perfect scenario. What if a client approves the work, approves the job? They're arguing with you at the counter that says, they're saying, no, I did not approve it.

Jimmy Lea: You click play and it could be the husband or the wife is in front of you. Here's the approval play.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. There's, we're in a, we are in a litigious industry and having all the tools to protect yourself. It's important. All those all those tools can do more than one thing. So even if all you had it for was to protect, you know, to protect yourself.

Jimmy Lea: DYA huh? It would

Ryan Snow: be, it would be worth it. But there's so many more things that you get out of it that it's worth having. Yeah.

Jimmy Lea: Oh, it so is it, so is having a great phone system is paramount. That communication, being able to speak to people. It, we are in a relationship business and really part of relationship is communication, so.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. That's phenomenal. What other marketing ideas, what other marketing concepts or philosophies, theologies, what are you doing?

Ryan Snow: We've intermittently tried to, you know, stay up on Instagram and Facebook. You know, we. We've done some work with a few people on YouTube and like been featured on their channel for a second.

Ryan Snow: And so we'll get the itch like, oh, we, we get some views and we get some, we get to write on some coattails of being mentioned. Yeah. And we gotta put some content together, but it all falls apart as soon as we get busy. At least it does for me.

Jimmy Lea: It's true. That's a hard one. That's a hard one to stay on top of that YouTube channel.

Jimmy Lea: There, there's a couple of shops that do it extremely well, I think of days automotive and, the sherwoods, they do a great job of that.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. Yeah. They just kill it. And I don't think I have the attention span to, to dedicate myself to that much, to it, to have that level of success.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah.

Ryan Snow: You know, I'd say in the last 18 months I've really tried to. Get in on what we can track data on. So, everything that happens online we can track really good data too. I used to hate tracking numbers. I remember when the phone book ad people used to come in and want to sell us a tracking number so they could tell us how many phone calls they generated.

Ryan Snow: And I thought that was the dumbest idea ever. Now I have like 24 different tracking numbers.

Jimmy Lea: Right. I know. I used to be, I used to be one of those guys. I was selling tracking numbers, not that I was with the phone book, I was with conversa or log my calls back in the day. Oh yeah. Long my calls.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. But you know, everything we do online, we can track really well. I have been doing some radio and. We, you know, we get people come in and mention it, but you can't really, that's a hard track it as a hard source.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. It's top of mind. That's that top of mind marketing.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. But it's fun.

Ryan Snow: You get out there, make some noise. We try to sponsor some community events. I don't go crazy with it, but, you know, you know, rodeos there's a new men's baseball league that started up in southern Utah this year. So we're the Hall of Fame sponsor and the inaugural, you know, big sponsor.

Jimmy Lea: Nice.

Ryan Snow: For that men's baseball league. So that was fun. I got to go out and butcher throwing a first pitch for the first time in my life

Jimmy Lea: then. Yeah. And did you throw it over his head or did you throw it in the dirt?

Ryan Snow: I like bounced it at the plate and they were like, Hey, yeah. At least you made it to the plate.

Ryan Snow: And I'm like, that's a for showing.

Jimmy Lea: That's a win. We'll take it.

Ryan Snow: Well, that was cool. You know, went out to the game and you know, shot some photos for him and, you know, took the big camera out and rattled off a bunch of frames and got him a bunch of shots the next day.

Jimmy Lea: Nice. Nice.

Ryan Snow: Got see, you know, see logo on all the baseball jerseys. And I was like, ah, it feels pretty, that feels pretty wholesome.

Ryan Snow: I like that.

Jimmy Lea: Gotta love that. Congrats man. Way to sponsor the baseball team. Maybe I can get my son out on that baseball team.

Ryan Snow: Yeah they had a, I can't remember how many teams they ended up with, but it was like nine or 10 different teams. Wow. So way more players at the games than spectators, but

Jimmy Lea: Oh, for sure.

Jimmy Lea: For sure. That's awesome stuff. Like,

Ryan Snow: that's fun. We'll have to, we'll have to see. See what it turns into.

Jimmy Lea: Oh yeah, for sure. For sure. It'll be a fun thing. Was there anything else that you would want to discuss marketing wise, shop wise, personnel wise, people wise that we haven't talked about already?

Ryan Snow: I think what I think what I'd like to end on is you and I have had some conversations over the years in the past about like, like, what is, what does the industry need?

Ryan Snow: You know, what can we even do as low humans to help service the industry? But, you know, maybe it's just because I've been on a big recruitment push for the last year and a half, and I've had to hire and start to develop and let some guys go, or have some guys leave me. That, that I think one of the in, in the top three issues of scaling a business are our ability to, you know, recruit and retain talented people.

Jimmy Lea: Amen. Amen.

Ryan Snow: And when you bring somebody who is talented, that still has a lot of potential to grow. You know, can our company even move fast enough to hold onto people like that?

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Okay. So what do you think? And tho

Ryan Snow: and tho and those are the winners, like those are the people that you want to hang onto for a really long time.

Jimmy Lea: Totally agree. I love it. I love where you're going. Keep going.

Ryan Snow: And so, as you know, so as a business owner and as a leader, that's what keeps me up at night is I don't believe it. When people say nobody wants to work. I don't believe it. When people say that there's no technicians to hire, I don't believe it when people say that this is a declining industry.

Ryan Snow: What I do know is that the way we come up through the industry, the way we have come up through the industry is definitely not the way that we're gonna be moving forward. And you know, just because it had to go a certain way for me doesn't mean that it needs to go that certain way for somebody that's just jumping into the industry now.

Ryan Snow: And so when I try to dream about my company, I'm always dreaming about a company that, that has enough lateral mobility for people to, if they get on a bus and they find out in the wrong seat, like, how do we have another seat for that person? That's why I'm drawn to a larger scale, single location, because there's a lot more kind of micro positions that start to establish as you divvy up tasks there there's a couple of different places where you could sit to where you might be able to employ more of your strengths and have somebody else be able to cover your weaknesses.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah.

Ryan Snow: I haven't figured it out yet. I can probably be completely wrong. This is not legal or financial advice. You should be doing something more productive with your time and not listening to me.

Jimmy Lea: The school of hard knocks gives your qualifications and you are qualified, sir.

Ryan Snow: But that's what I think the biggest issue of the industry is we have to evolve and we have to be able to move fast through a rapidly changing set of technology, a rapidly changing economic system, a rapidly changing political system.

Ryan Snow: And people say that doesn't influence anything about cars, but it absolutely does. And we're gonna have to do it with the bulk of the knowledge base that exists in the industry on the retirement end of scale, moving the way out. And luckily. So much of that knowledge and that wisdom is, it's not that, it's not that it's outdated or antiquated, it's just not current anymore.

Ryan Snow: And so everybody in the industry has already had to kind of move on and get onto this leading edge instead of the trailing edge. And if we hadn't already gone through that, we would already be screwed.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Yeah. That's the beauty of this industry. It's an ever evolving, ever learning experience.

Jimmy Lea: And we can make mistakes and we can learn from our mistakes. We learn more from our failure than we do our success. Hopefully we don't fail too much on the road to success

Ryan Snow: that we get to deal with 100% variables with 100%, you know, gumption.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah.

Ryan Snow: You know, ev every scenario starts off a little differently and every place that scenario happens at is a little bit different.

Jimmy Lea: We live in a world of multitude of correct answers.

Ryan Snow: And that's a problem. Yeah. I've had to start going through, I'm not real big on Facebook, but I've had to start going through and just leaving a bunch of Facebook groups because every, there's a lot of noise out there. You just get one, one group of people that are like, no, this Kool-Aid is the right Kool-Aid, and everybody else is a freaking idiot.

Jimmy Lea: No, that's your Kool-Aid.

Ryan Snow: And that's your Kool-Aid? No, this one over here is me. Yeah. So like I don't buy all, yeah. I don't buy all this drama that's getting stirred up about different coaching groups or different angles of business or

Jimmy Lea: Yeah,

Ryan Snow: whatever. Whatever these kids are squabbling about these days.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Well, you know how to keep a lobster inside of a basket, don't you? How's that? You put in another lobster. Or a crab. You put in a crab. If you only have one, yes, you climb right out. But if you put two crabs in there, they'll keep pulling each other down. Can give somebody

Ryan Snow: something to fight.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. So, so, yeah, I agree with you.

Jimmy Lea: Pull out of those ones that are just noise.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. There, there is so much business for everybody that's in this business.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah.

Ryan Snow: There's no reason we need to be trying to race to the bottom or cut each other's throats.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah.

Ryan Snow: The better the aftermarket works as an industry, the better it's gonna be for everybody in the industry.

Ryan Snow: So,

Jimmy Lea: that's right. Let's lock arms because there's and to coaching and training. I do believe that every shop needs a coach and a trainer. Just as every professional athlete needs a coach and a trainer and they have multiple, yeah. It helps you to be better. It holds you accountable. If you're left to your own devices, you'll accept your own excuses.

Ryan Snow: You can only go so far without knowing what you don't know.

Jimmy Lea: Exactly.

Ryan Snow: Hundred

Jimmy Lea: percent. And

Ryan Snow: you don't want to, you don't want to be the once, once you're the smartest person in the room where, what are you supposed to do? You gotta find a different room. You gotta find a different room. So

Jimmy Lea: yeah,

Ryan Snow: that, that's been a massive benefit for me.

Ryan Snow: You know, I stepped into coaching. I already have a decent understanding of how to run a business, but I had a very poor understanding of how to be a good leader or how to be, how to actually be a good manager. And, you know, I got massive amounts of help through the, you know, the direction and the support and the network of people that you developed.

Jimmy Lea: I love it. You

Ryan Snow: know, doesn't have to be even through a coaching group. Like, like there's a thousand ways to meet people in the industry. Just go meet 'em and talk to 'em.

Jimmy Lea: Oh yeah. And there's plenty, a plethora of personal self-help books.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah.

Jimmy Lea: In a way it read one of Read Reader Leaders are readers, and it is so true.

Jimmy Lea: If you're not reading, you're not learning, you're not growing, you're becoming stagnant. Is there a book that you're reading right now, Ryan?

Ryan Snow: I just restarted reading a book that I probably read like 15 years ago that I really like called so Good that they Can't Ignore You. Oh, I love that. It's by Cal Newport.

Jimmy Lea: Oh, nice.

Ryan Snow: And it talks about how, you know, the concept of if you do a thing that you love, you're never working,

Jimmy Lea: doesn't quite

Ryan Snow: hold, doesn't quite hold water.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. Because you're working even harder.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. Like, what if you take a really honest account of what your strengths are, Uhhuh and what you're not good at.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. And found something that, that employed your strengths. How much more powerful could that be?

Jimmy Lea: Oh, it is absolutely more powerful. So the most recent book that I've been reading is the how to make offers So Good. People Feel, let's see the full title. How to Make Offers So Good.

Jimmy Lea: People Feel Stupid saying No.

Ryan Snow: Interesting.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah. And there's a whole series of books here that I'm gonna be reading. Alex Hermo or Mozy.

Ryan Snow: Oh, I feel like I've read something else by that guy.

Jimmy Lea: He has a hundred million dollar offers, a hundred million dollar leads, a hundred million dollar sales.

Jimmy Lea: He's got a whole series of stuff and he started in the Gym Gymnasium world. And I

Ryan Snow: I just heard of a book that I'm gonna look up while I'm on here so I don't forget, called How how to Make a Few Billion Dollars.

Jimmy Lea: A few million. Okay.

Ryan Snow: A few billion dollars. Oh, a

Jimmy Lea: few B billion. Okay.

Ryan Snow: Yeah. By Brad Jacobs.

Ryan Snow: I heard this, I heard a clip of this guy talking about you know, making business acquisitions and thought it sounded really interesting and that caught my eye. So I'm gonna download that right now so I can check it out.

Jimmy Lea: Yeah, I just wrote it down as well, Brad, Jake. Nice. I'll check it out. For sure.

Jimmy Lea: Well, Brian, it's been a pleasure talking with you. I, we could talk for hours and Dave Yeah. I

Ryan Snow: was just thinking we've got a little long-winded, but that's what they get for putting the two of us together.

Jimmy Lea: That's exactly right. We'll have to circle back again and do this again. Ryan, it's just been a, an awesome privilege and a pleasure to be able to speak with you today.

Jimmy Lea: Thank you.

Ryan Snow: Hey, anytime. Glad to be of assistance and it's good to see you. Good to see you, brother.